Nicholas Stargardt addresses the question of the remarkable resilience of the German state and society during the Second World War. Like Italy, German cities were subjected to massive Allied air raids from 1942 onwards, but there was no German equivalent to the strike-wave that swept northern and central Italy in the spring of 1943, and it is this comparison which is the starting point for Nicholas Stargardt’s analysis of how German society coped with the crises of this period. He argues that it was that society’s capacity to recover from crises which made it possible for the regime to go on fighting the war till the end. He proposes that the dynamic quality of these crises takes us beyond the conventional explanations of state-society in terms of coercion and consent, and into an exploration of the transformation of subjectivities and social values, in particular the moral and psychological power of fear and hope.
